Pondering

June 26, 2013

In Part 2, we discussed the concept of SaaS and universal design & service liberalization challenges for design. In this post, we continue discussing additional challenges that designers need to be cognizant of to create optimal user experiences that meet a wider mass appeal.

The challenge is to think of ways to keep the interest of expert users and allow them to grow but at the same time nurture less knowledgeable users. Reaching that design balance will be the challenge of user experience as we think of the delivery of one solution for all.

New devices

Not only are we going to attract a new user group, we are also going to interact with users through a plethora of devices and modalities. These new users often come from a myriad of desktop applications; all with different terminology and interaction styles. The challenge for designers is to continue to support experts but also provide a user experience that offers a fast learning path for new users, no matter their previous software experience or the devices and interaction from which they will access our solutions.

The Value of Intangibles: User Financial considerations

In the context of Autodesk business, many users are interested in Media & Entertainment creation suites and/or individual products, but cannot justify the cost of purchasing professional level software as they would only use it for a small portion of their work. For many customers the reason to move to SaaS is that it often offers a fee model that does not require heavy upfront investment and can scale as you grow. The lower cost of entry is more likely to attract new users who were previously discouraged by the upfront cost.

From a UX perspective we need to think about what it means to bring a large group of users from disparate applications together and in a short amount of time get them all to be productive using our software.

Multiple vendors, Trust, Collaboration & Social

Overall the user experience is defined by the interaction between the software and the end user, but with cloud applications some new actors enter the relationship. This includes the hosting provider, storage provider, browser provider, and ISP to name a few; all of these aspects influence the user experience.

While we are dependent on 3rd party vendors, the relationship is still between the customer and us. We are therefore responsible for the whole user experience and vendor’s problems reflect directly on us.

Another challenge the UX must address is building confidence in remote storage and processing. User interactions must be quick and responsive and where processing is happening, the user must be made aware and progress indication shown – the user should not be left to guess if the application is simply not responding or has crashed.

Last but not least, as we design we need to remain acutely conscious of the natural human tendency to collaborate and connect. While each design project dictates different levels and definitions of “social”, this is an ever present element and the new mainstay of web services today. In a nutshell, the user experience challenge as we move to a SaaS model can be summarized in the following guiding principles:

As we begin to understand this new landscape in all its intricacies, we are one step closer to building optimal user experiences. We take into consideration the spectrum of users, devices, and the concepts of service value, as well as the wider implications of interoperability. We are now on a playing field where user experience factors are shaped by many things out of our control but are owned by us.

June 11, 2013

In Part 1 of
this blog post series, we discussed the concept of Cloud-Aware User Experience
Thinking and what it means for the traditional UX practice. Cloud-Aware
User Experience focuses on the transformed environment of cloud service
delivery and how it impacts the overall user experience. In this post, we’ll
discuss more areas that need consideration as we design solutions for cloud
delivery:

Understanding the concepts of Software as Service (SaaS);

Understanding
universal design & software service liberalization and the multi-layered
impact of web services liberalization and what it means for the changing
spectrum of users;

Understanding the changing expectations and values that users associate with cloud service delivery.

SaaS: From traditional software to SaaS

SaaS (Software as a Service) often refers to an "on-demand"
software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted on
the cloud, as opposed to the traditional mode of delivery, where software was
hosted on individual user machines.

Today, SaaS is quickly becoming the most common
delivery model for application delivery, including Autodesk’s own suite of
products. Instead of being confined to their desktops, users can now log
in anytime, anywhere and on any device. This also means a gradual
departure from the purchase of physically packaged and downloadable software to
usage of hosted solutions. Hosted services also come with fewer limitations on
such things as cost. Further, SaaS has built-in scalability capabilities for
users seeking more flexibility of use.

Universal Design & Service Liberalization Challenges for Design

As technology matures, there is a tendency for initial software
complexity to give way to simplicity as the audience broadens. In the
automotive world, for example, a good contrast is manual transmission being
available for enthusiasts, but automatic transmission being pitched to the mass
audiences, with both options allowing end consumers to accomplish the same end
goal – the act of driving. In much the same way, service delivery to the cloud
is going to broaden our audience; therefore, we must be ready to support users
who know what they want to achieve without the burden of committing to months
or years of software training. Retaining a wider audience requires that new
users can become quickly productive, quickly achieving their goals and having a
path to grow their knowledge organically.

The migration to the cloud holds the
potential to on-board a wider audience, but we can’t forget, as designers, to
maintain the interest of users who may view the widening access as a threat to their
jobs. In many cases, end users have used the technological divide as a means of
self-identification for work purposes. Much like a developer who may describe
himself as a JAVA or C+ developer, the same holds true in the space of 3D,
where many certified solution users may have gone through years of training to
use a title associated with a product line. However, as we see more software being delivered via cloud
services there will be significant changes in how users will see their relationship
to software as a whole as well as how we should go about designing appropriate
experiences for this technological divide.

In Part 3 of the blog we continue on this thread
of creating mass appeal user experiences for software cloud delivery as well as
some of the other challenges that we will encounter as experience designers.

January 08, 2013

Cloud
Computing is the next generation of computing. The trend towards increasing
adoption of delivery platforms, such as mobile and ubiquitous technologies, make
implementation challenging. The marriage of cloud and mobile technology demands
attention from end users if it is to be the new “normal” mode of web service
delivery. As more companies embrace cloud computing, end-user experience challenges
can be mitigated with good UX practices and general guidelines.

As early as
2003, Forrester Research predicted a trend in both the mobile and cloud based
web services delivery. Today, companies are beginning to set cloud occupation
goals. We will see a change in service delivery from traditional packaged
software to a wider audience packed in the form of web services, allowing for
software liberalization to the masses. This will change how end users respond and
interact with services delivered in this form. Companies will need to consider
design for a universal audience who may not have the esoteric skillset of past professional
users. Forrester analyst Glenn O'Donnell writes, "cloud plus mobile is a
classic more than the sum of its parts combination." This disruptive
paradigm will become a challenge as we ideate a sustainable user experience in
the cloud.

From a UX perspective,
we need to transcend the general principles of a good user experience: satisfaction,
effectiveness, efficiency, learnability and memorability. We also need to
infuse what I will call Cloud-Aware User
ExperienceThinking. That is thinking about the transformed environment
of the cloud and the user expectations in this new space. This includes a keen
understanding of the following:

Software
as Service (SaaS): What it is and what it means for the end user?

Universal
Design & Service Liberalization: The impact of web services liberalization
and what it means for the collective wider scale of users.

Social,
Collaborations: Leveraging and fusing the social and collaborative ideals into
web service delivery.

Cloud Computing and the New User
Experience

Cloud
computing is a disruptive model for enabling convenient, on-demand access to configurable
shared computing assets and resources. This includes servers, networks, data
storage space, applications, and other services. It is distinct from the World Wide
Web. It leverages the web to offer a new way of service packaging and delivery.
Cloud delivery means service providers have minimal interaction with the user
and as a result can focus on quicker service delivery. As the level of connection between
traditional service providers and end users erodes, optimal UX design becomes
even more important. Users need to be self-sufficient as well as learn and grow
with little to no service provider support. Users also require a strong sense
of safety in a space that seemingly often undermines such necessities of
privacy, security and trust.

What this means for User Experience
and Design

As
traditional UX evolves to accommodate new technologies, we must understand the changing
landscape, conditions, and user expectation. This is challenging but not necessarily
daunting. Ensuring an optimal sustainable user experience will determine both
long and short-term adoption and growth of web services as traditional software
offerings transforms to SaaS. Fusing the prevailing ideals of user
experience and sustainability one can address the key ideas for building the
right Cloud User Experience.

In my next article,
I will take a deeper look at the following topics as we examine a more evolved
user experience in the clouds. The article will address the following UX
challenges.

SaaS: From traditional software to SaaS.

Universal Design & Service
Liberalization: Designing
to a wider scale of users.

Value of Service Delivery: Context of service value and what it
all means for cloud computing.

Taken
together, this and subsequent articles will help expand UX thinking and help us
as professionals to understand the broader scope of what it means to design a
cloud user experience.

July 10, 2012

One of my passions is exploring the possibilities of human-computer interaction. Perhaps it is my background in industrial design, but there is something particularly interesting to me in the ways that we try to bridge the gap between our bodies and our machines. We are naturally high bandwidth, multi-sensory creatures and we are trying to send and receive information from a machine that is functionally deaf, dumb and blind.

If some of the researchers have their way, the future is going to be full of much richer exchanges between ourselves and our machines. I recently attended the CHI 2012 conference where I saw some great examples such as the ZeroTouch interface. Multitouch on our phones or tablets is not so new anymore, but it is still a rare thing to see on large desktop sized displays. The Texas A&M Interface Ecology Lab showed an evolution to an old touch screen technology which may change this situation. Using a ring of infared emitters and detectors, the team has been able to create an optical sensing solution that does not suffer from occlusion and precision problems like other bezel-based touch solutions. The ZeroTouch is fast, accurate, works on a large scale and unlike many other multitouch devices, is relatively low cost. The ZeroTouch system was originally shown at CHI 2011, where the largest display they had it working on was a 27” monitor. At this year’s event they had improved the performance and had scaled it up to work on a 55” plasma TV.

The ZeroTouch was also interesting to me because of the fact that it was a frame, and not a screen or surface. This is significant for a few reasons. Firstly, despite the growing number of multitouch displays coming to market, it will be years before any significant number of people have access to this new technology. Secondly, some people work in places that spend a lot of money to have color accurate displays. These people are not going to want to throw away that investment just to have a richer interaction modality. If the ZeroTouch were to come out as an after-market enhancement to your existing screen – and if the price were right – it might just bridge that gap between the installed base of dumb displays and the next generation of touch-enabled displays. Finally, being a frame is interesting because it does not necessarily need to be mated to the surface of a display. It can hang out front and allow for open-air gestures like you might see with a Kinnect. While it cannot sense depth per-se, it does open the possibility of something going beyond what can be done with a surface sensor.

Hand and arm gestures are a great way of enriching our interaction with computers, but for some researchers it is our sense of taste that has been neglected for too long. Hiromi Nakamura was part of the team from Meiji University who showcased concept devices that introduced electric current into food as it is being eaten. At CHI 2012 they had a cup that had a wire in a straw which would electrify lemonade as it was drunk, and a fork that had a variable slider to adjust the electrification of food on the fork. Through modulation of the electric current passing through the food, different reactions from our taste buds can be elicited. In theory this could mean tastes like the amount of saltiness or sourness could be dynamically adjusted by changing the electrical waveform and intensity. In practice I found that the natural sourness of the lemonade overpowered my perception of any change to the drink. The cheese on the electrified fork on the other hand really did taste different. While holding the cheese on my tongue with the electric fork, I could taste distinct changes in the flavor as I slid the control from low to high. It was quite a remarkable experience to have flavors change in your mouth without adding or removing anything. Unfortunately, the alteration was making the cheese simply taste more or less metallic – not exactly an appealing flavor.

The practicalities and value of allowing a computer to interface with our sense of taste may be questionable, but adding sensors and actuators to enrich our experience is a good idea. Already our mobile devices communicate across our visual, auditory and tactile senses. Maybe someday we’ll have dental implants that make us taste candy when our sweetheart calls.

June 05, 2012

I’m just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada this week, at the annual conference of the Usability Professionals Association. While eating breakfast, I looked out the window of the M Resort and saw that the conference name was spelled wrong on the exterior marquee – instead of “UPA”, it said “UXPA”. What did this mean?

Sure enough, right after breakfast the announcement was made official: the UPA is renaming itself to the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA), and is starting the process of remaking itself to better fit this new name. Word went out immediately through Twitter, and within a few minutes responses were coming back from around the world, ranging from the delighted to the irritated.

Personally, I thought the name change was well past time. Most of the industry has long realized that paying attention to usability is not enough. The direct usability of your product or service is only one of many touchpoints that your clients and customers have with your business. Those of us who design products or services tend to think of the sales department or the web division or the customer support group as being separate from ourselves. But as far as customers are concerned, a business has a single face. You can provide a really easy-to-use product, but if your purchase process is painful, you’re not going to be thought of as a company that’s easy to do business with.

In an Ignite session today about social media, the question was raised: are you where your customers are? If your customers are talking about you on Twitter, are you there listening? Better yet, are you responding? A customer who gets a response to a problem posted on Twitter sees that response as a part of the overall experience of dealing with your business. Your lack of response will be seen the same way. Listening and responding to the vast social media landscape can be a daunting idea, raising all kinds of issues about scalability and setting expectations. But these are exactly the sort of business questions companies need to be thinking about nowadays.

Usability can’t be isolated from the rest of User Experience. We all need to look at the bigger picture. So I, for one, applaud the UPA for staking out a new direction. Now let’s see if they – we – can follow through.

February 28, 2012

Recently I attended the UX Camp DC unconference. For those unfamiliar with unconference or BarCamp events, loosely this means that the agenda for the day is open and participant driven. Any attendee can hold a discussion, workshop, or talk on a topic of interest. I’d like to share some of the insights, tips, and takeaways from the sessions I attended.

Designing for the Future You

Dana challenged us to re-consider including age on personas. As demonstrated in an interactive session, age can tempt the designer to make assumptions and projections, or use stereotypes that may be invalid and could lead to a broken design.

Instead of age Dana suggests ranking personas from low to high on attitude, aptitude, and ability scales in relation to the technology. This will help you create and gage designs for your users without thinking about age.

Takeaway: If a particular piece of information does not help you design for your users and/or is prone to stereotypes and assumptions, don’t include it in personas. One suggestion: replace age with attitude, aptitude, and ability rankings.

VizThink

Dan hit with an interactive and high energy session titled “VizThink”. Together we explored how visuals directly impact the details of a message by studying one of the masters – Dr. Suess. We also proved that anyone can sketch/draw and that it is an informative way to convey ideas.

Takeaway: Visuals provide both context and attitude to the content they accompany. Also, they engage your audience!

Critiquing Critique

As designers we are familiar with having our work critiqued, and critiquing others’ work. By critiquing the personal websites of attendees we identified critique approaches that did and didn’t work, and Jared used this experience to offer further suggestions and insights.

A common pitfall was for the critique to become a group design session with everyone offering their opinions on how to design the site. Avoid this temptation! Critique is not design and should instead attempt to separate “what” from “how” and focus on the issues. Getting to the rationale is what is important; designers are good at coming up with designs on their own.

It will also take some pressure off the presenter to establish roles for the critique session. Jared recommends 'critic', 'presenter', 'facilitator', and 'recorder'.

Takeaway: Critique is about surfacing the problem, not generating solutions.

Going out to Eat

Jimmy’s session drew analogies between operating a restaurant and designing software. Restaurateurs know emotions play heavily into their customer experience and are masters at exploiting this. There is a lot we can learn from them:

Emotions change how we face and solve problems

Emotions are critical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought

Experience is more memorable than the product itself

Takeaway: Leverage customer emotion in the design of products and services.

August 30, 2011

Usability lies in the details. If you’ve worked in the UX field for a while, you’ve probably heard that spoken. While it is important to build the right features in your software, it is equally important to build the features right – to take care of the details that make the difference between a user flowing effortlessly through a task, and that same user getting completely stuck at step one.

Unfortunately, this property of usability work can make it very difficult for the work to get done at all. From the high-level view, we all know that reaching a certain level of usability is critical for the success of a product. Many usability teams fight hard to get usability bugs treated just the same as functionality bugs. But there are drawbacks to this approach: in the trenches of development, individual detail-changes that leads to that usability can seem inconsequential when compared to the “real” bugs competing for developer time. “Yes, we know that people have trouble figuring out how to use the feature, but at least it’s possible.” UX fixes can get pushed further and further down the priority list, until they fall off the end of the development cycle.

Usability practitioners aren’t the only ones with this problem. Have you ever wondered why so many health care practitioners are in such bad shape physically? They of all people know how critical it is to eat well and get regular exercise, but many of them never do. It’s not because they’re lazy (have you any idea how hard nurses work?) but rather because they are faced with the same problem. They know that exercise and good eating in general is critical, but every day they (and we) are faced with prioritization choices. It’s easy to justify skipping a good meal this one time (I have to do the grocery shopping!), or not exercising this one-day (I have to pick up my sister at the airport!). Tomorrow we’ll get back on track, right? But tomorrow something else always seems to come up. A series of completely logical small decisions turn into a health disaster over time. What’s to be done?

There is a third area where this problem is prevalent, and also where we find clues to some solutions. That third area is money management. We all know that we need to save regularly for our retirement, but we know people who never do – they live paycheck-to-paycheck, never able to save, even though they may earn good money. Again, this comes from what seems to them like a series of completely logical decisions: “No money in the retirement fund this month, because we need to pay for cousin Sue’s wedding present. Next month we’ll get back on track.” But next month, there’s always something else. In personal finance, however, there are well known and widely used solutions to this problem. I’ll talk about two in particular: “Pay Yourself First” and “Budgeting”, and see how they might apply to UX.

“Pay Yourself First” is where you set up automatic deductions from your pay or your bank account. So the money is removed from your awareness before you get a chance to spend it on something else. This is probably the best technique for ensuring that you have long-term savings – it prevents you from ever having to make those kinds of prioritization choices. “Budgeting” is where you decide in advance how you are going to divide up your resources (money) into each category of spending. It’s a way to make sure that line-by-line prioritization decisions don’t lead to ridiculous outcomes. (Imagine if a government had to compare the relative priority of every line item in their spending --- all money would be spent in critical health care. Is fixing the potholes on that road really more important than saving Grandma’s life?)

Can we apply these principles back to our UX problems? We sure can.

For Usability Practitioners, “Pay Yourself First” can happen a few ways:

If you have outstanding usability fixes from a previous release, try scheduling them early in the next development cycle – before new bugs are coming in.

Whenever possible, try to do your usability testing and improvements on paper prototypes of your designs, so that by the time development starts work, the usability problems have been fixed.

There are also a few ways to use the idea of “Budgeting” – these will require the cooperation of the development team:

Budget by time: set aside one day a week (or every two weeks) where the development team does nothing but fix little usability bugs. A concentrated effort can plow through a large number of bugs in a short time, leading to real improvement. Towards the end of the development cycle, it is likely that development may decide that “regular” bug fixing is more important, but by that time a lot of the required usability work will already be done.

Budget by person: Have one developer (this is a great job for an intern or summer student) who is dedicated to fixing small problems, including usability problems. It works even better if this developer reports to the usability team, and can’t be pulled onto other duties.

In the comments section, let me know how your team gets its usability fixes in. Let's get a conversation going.

April 17, 2009

So I was happy to see a coffee maker in my hotel room while I was at CHI – particularly since CHI starts at 8:15am. Being an upscale hotel, my room had an upscale coffee maker laid out nicely on a tray.

There was an instruction card propped up in the coffee maker. My guess is that the instruction card was created after the 500th call to the front desk to say that the coffee packs were twice the size of the basket they are supposed to go into and the cheerful front desk staff were getting less cheerful when telling the guests they should stuff it. (The coffee pack into the basket, that is.)

This got me thinking about the design of documentation. Can you spot the missing step in the (unfortunately slightly fuzzy) instructions below?

Do you think that, even in the early morning, there are people who end up slurping coffee off the table top because the instructions didn’t say to put a cup in to catch the coffee? I rather doubt it.

I like the concept of not treating the readers of documentation like idiots. This little card gave me the information that I needed and couldn’t know ahead of time (how much water to use, the filter looks too big but is the right size, only push the button once) without wasting my time by giving me information that I either already knew or could easily guess (I can get water from the sink, I need to use a cup).

Can we use this concept in software documentation? What parts can safely be left out so that we are only highlighting the pieces that are really needed? This is different than trying to reduce word count by using simple writing concepts (which I am a big fan of).

Back in the 1980’s, software documentation had to include instructions on how to use a mouse. This was dropped when mouse usage became part of the general knowledge people were expected to have -- just like catching the coffee with a cup is. Are there concepts in our documentation that are just as obsolete, but we’re keeping them to be complete? How do we root these out?